Precursive recently presented Fixing the Capacity Crunch, In High-Velocity Services Delivery. During this webinar, we were joined by three guest speakers, Kimberly Simms, CCO at Planful, Phil Davitt, Global Director of PMO at Condeco and Peter Lyon, VP of Customer Success at Poppulo.
Our panelists came together to discuss:
How to avoid the pitfalls of the capacity crunch by focusing on capacity metrics, upskilling your team and focusing on time-to-value (TTV).
Closing the gap between Customer Success (CS) and Professional Services (PS) to enable better delivery.
How improving your capacity planning can increase staff retention.
We answered questions on capacity directly from our audience, read the answers from our experts below:
1. Phil talked about managed services, this sounds like Technical Account Management. Do you have a TAM team or function that engages with your customers, post-implementation, to continue to drive value? And if so, does this team help retain customers and reduce churn?
Answer: (Phil) This is seen more as a support desk function, a customer calls up with a request and a team member is available to do it. Some can proactively reach out to ensure systems are updated regularly.
Condeco is building a TAM team to engage with customers post-implementation but will not cross over with the CS team. The TAM team's role is to retain customers and reduce churn to ensure customer blockers are removed. This of course is done at the moment, but it is not one person’s dedicated role.
Kimberly: We have a PS team focused purely on Onboarding. CS are focused on driving adoption and reducing churn. CS are measured on retention and PS on margin, so their roles are different. We also have a SSM, Strategic Sales Manager, to grow the account. CS identifies an opportunity and the SSM grows the opportunity. CS teams are not responsible for selling.
Peter: As long as there is clarity with the customer over the role of the TAM and CSM, customers need to know who is fixing what problem. The more complex your platform is the more there is a need for a TAM for some accounts.
2. How do you suggest buffering in time for your CSM or Project Manager (depending on who is doing the onboarding)?
Answer: (Kimberly) Standard pitch decks and repeatable processes are very important, standardize as much as you can and do not reinvent the wheel. It’s a great way for your team to step in and learn new skills.
Peter: Sales enablement is crucial. Clarity and regular attendance at sales meetings from the project managers. PMs should be coming in at the end of the sales process to talk about the value that the service team brings. You can give the sales team a spreadsheet indicating the time span of onboarding. Make sure you know what sales teams need to close their deals.
Phil: There is a need for having a proper time-sheeting capability. You need to build this into your plan at the beginning. It is a good way to measure how many people you need in your team - time cards can back this up.
3. When you have a large services delivery team, how do you ensure the entire team is delivering in the right way so you do not see pinch points? For example, when Project Managers are overrun.
Answer: (Phil) When you are small your Project Managers can be completely utilized as they are experts in everything. When you are at medium and large not all PMs will have all skills needed, you also cannot have bench time. You need the right tools to be able to do so. If your forecasting is not accurate, you need a tool to be able to see where extra skills are needed or when there are gaps in projects.
Kimberly: When you are looking at your teams and you have more than one product, you can have teams that have majors and minors. You can give the team opportunities to expand their skillset.
4. Several of the speakers have spoken about factoring in the customer's capacity in addition to your Professional Services teams. How do you go about formalizing and accounting for that in repeatable and scalable processes?
Answer: (Peter) A clear framework for how you onboard your platform, and clear customer responsibilities. Outline the impact if customers do not supply the resources needed. Show the customer the risk and the timeline. Escalate upwards when the customer's resource is not playing ball. Your customer contact will thank you for it.
Phil: At some point, the customer will want training on the product. We scaled our training to make it the customer's responsibility, we trained their trainer. Making the customer the expert.
Kimberly: It’s about expectation management. Have a one-to-one with your exec sponsor and talk to them about potential project risks. You can then quickly bring them to the table when a risk happens.
Follow up questions answered by our panelists:
1. How do you manage a PS team around the potential conflict associated with a High-Velocity Services Delivery model and rapid TTV? Specifically, rapid TTV frequently assumes a more intense customer experience yet staff are juggling multiple projects?
Kimberly: This can be challenging - I think it's focused more on getting something of value into their hands faster, without compromising quality, which should be the goal i.e. instead of a full solution delivery, maybe it's a partial or a component of the solution delivered. I believe agile and iterative approaches allow for this, and it comes back to expectation setting with the customer as well that you will iterate over time and continually improve it. There is some advantage to this as well because often customers don't know what they don't know- and once they start using something they will have a better perspective of the experience - the agile approach of continuous improvement is a good one to deal with scenarios such as this.
2. Kimberly talked about productive utilization - how is this measured?
Kimberly: For my team, this is measured as combining customer-facing hours (non-billable work) + billable work. Once you take out holidays, PTO, Sick Days, enablement, etc from an individual's available work time - the hours remaining can be a good target for productive utilization for team members. You can incorporate a ratio of customer-facing: billable work if you believe there is an issue with resources giving away too much free time.
3. Looking at the issue of scaling quickly, Kimberly mentioned the use of partners in managing capacity. How do you find the onboarding process for partners compared to new team members?
Kimberly: It is an investment for sure. For implementation resources, we have a targeted team that manages onboarding of partners and are now in the process of rolling out an implementation bootcamp for partners to train them on deploying our solution according to our methodology. We will incorporate office hours and design reviews as part of our team, as well as ensure an employee participates in a few of their first projects (in a billable role) to ensure quality and consistency.
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